The Ladies Lindores · Chapter 7 (2/2)

“It is a wonderful comfort to be able to calculate upon you,” he said. “My son-in-law⁠—for of course you have heard of Carry’s marriage⁠—would have a great deal of influence if he chose to exert it; but he has his own notions⁠—his own notions. You will understand, when you make his acquaintance, that though a sterling character, he has not had all the advantages that might have been wished, of acquaintance with men and knowledge of the world. But you, my dear Erskine, you know something of life. By the by,” he said, as he rose to go away, “Lady Lindores charged me to engage you to come to us tomorrow. We are going away to town, but not for more than a month. The ladies insist that they must see you before they go. We all look forward to seeing a great deal of you,” the Earl added, with that manner which was always so fascinating. “Between you and me, our dear neighbours are a set of prejudiced old rustics,” he said, with a confidential smile, as he went out; “but it will be strange if you and I together cannot make them hear reason.” Could anything be more flattering to a young man? And it was the father of Edith who grasped his hand thus warmly⁠—who associated him with himself in a conjunction so flattering. John forgot the little wrench of theoretical disappointment⁠—the ludicrous ease with which he had been made to give place to Rintoul. After all, something must be sacrificed, he allowed, to the heir of an important family⁠—and the brother of Edith Lindores!

But this was not his last visitor on this eventful afternoon. The Earl had scarcely disappeared when Rolls once more threw open the door of the library, in which John usually sat, and announced with much solemnity Mr. Torrance of Tinto. The man whom the Earl, though vouching for him as “a sterling character,” had allowed to be wanting in knowledge of the world, came striding in with that air of taking up all the space in the room and finding it too small for him, which wealth and a vulgar mind are so apt to give. That John should dislike him instinctively from the moment he set eyes upon him, was nothing remarkable; for was not he the owner of the most obnoxious house in the neighbourhood? the man to whom Carry Lindores had been sacrificed? John Erskine felt, as he rose to meet the newcomer, a sense of the shabbiness and smallness of his own house, such as, even in the first evening of disenchantment, had scarcely affected him so strongly before. When his visitor cast round him that bold glance of his big, projecting, light-blue eyes, John saw through them the insignificance of the place altogether, and the humility of his own position, with a mortification which he could scarcely subdue. Torrance was tall and strong⁠—an immense frame of a man, with very black hair and dark complexion, and something insufferably insolent, audacious, cynical, in those large, light eyes, à fleur de tête. His insolence of nature was sufficiently evident; but what John did not see was the underlying sense of inferiority which his new visitor could not shake off, and which made him doubly and angrily arrogant, as it were, in his own defence. It galled him to recognise better manners and breeding than his own⁠—breeding and manners which perhaps he had found out, as John did the inferiority of his surroundings, through another’s eyes. But Torrance’s greeting was made with great show of civility. He had heard much of John as a friend of the family at Lindores, he said.

“Not but what I should have called, anyhow,” he explained, “though Tinto really belongs to the other side of the county, and Dalrulzian is rather out of the way for me; but still civility is civility, and in the country we’re a kind of neighbours. I hope you like it, now you are here?”

“Pretty well,” was all that John said.

“It’s a nice little place. Of course you knew what it was⁠—not one of the great country places; but it stands well, and it looks fine at a distance. Few places of its size look better when you’re a good bit away.”

This tried the young man’s patience, but he did his best to smile. “It is well enough,” he said; “I expected no better. It is not imposing like Tinto. Wherever one goes, it seems to me impossible to get out of sight of your big house.”

“Yes, it’s an eyesore to half the county; I’m well aware of that,” said Torrance, with complacency. “There’s far more of it than is any good to me. Lady Car⁠—I hear you knew Lady Car before we were married,” he said, fixing John almost threateningly with those light eyes⁠—“fills it now and then; and when I was a bachelor, I’ve seen it pretty full in September; but in a general way it’s too big, and a great trouble to keep up.”

“I hope Lady Caroline is quite well?” John said, with formal gravity.

“She is well enough. She is never what you call quite well. Women get into a way of ailing, I think, just as men get into a way of drinking. You were surprised to hear she was married, I suppose?” he asked abruptly, with again the same threatening, offensive look, which made John’s blood boil.

“I was surprised⁠—as one is surprised by changes that have taken place years before one hears of them; otherwise it is no surprise to hear that a young lady has married. Of course,” John added, with serious malice, “I had not the advantage of knowing you.”

Torrance stared at him for a moment, as if doubtful whether to take offence or not. Then he uttered, opening capacious jaws, a fierce laugh.

“I am very easy to get on with, for those that know me,” he said, “if that’s what you mean. We’re a model couple, Lady Car and I: everybody will tell you that. And I don’t object to old friends, as some men do. Let them come, I always say. If the difference is not in favour of the present, it’s a pity⁠—that’s all I say.”

To this John, not knowing what answer to make, replied only with a little bow of forced politeness, and nothing more.

“I suppose they were in a very different position when you used to know them?” said Torrance; “in a poor way enough⁠—ready to make friends with whoever turned up?”

“It would be very bad policy on my part to say so,” said John, “seeing that I was one of the nobodies to whom Lady Lindores, when she was Mrs. Lindores, was extremely kind⁠—as it seems to me she always is.”

“Ah, kind! that’s all very well: you weren’t nobody⁠—you were very eligible⁠—in those days,” said Torrance, with a laugh, for which John would have liked to knock him down; but there were various hindrances to this laudable wish. First, that it was John’s own house, and civility forbade any aggression; and second, that Tinto was much bigger and stronger than the person whom, perhaps, he did not intend to insult⁠—indeed there was no appearance that he meant to insult him at all. He was only a coarse and vulgar-minded man, speaking after his kind.

“The fact is, if you don’t mind my saying so, I’m not very fond of my mamma-in-law,” said Torrance. “Few men are, so far as I know: they put your wife up to all sorts of things. For my part, I think there’s a sort of conspiracy among women, and mothers hand it down to their daughters. A man should always part his wife from her belongings when he can. She’s a great deal better when she has nothing but him to look to. She sees then what’s her interest⁠—to please him and never mind the rest. Don’t you think I’m complaining⁠—Lady Car’s an exception. You never catch her forgetting that she’s Lady Caroline Torrance and has her place to fill. Doesn’t she do it, too! She’s the sort of woman, in one way, that’s frightened at a fly⁠—and on the other the queen wouldn’t daunt her; that’s the sort of woman I like. She’s what you call a grand damm⁠—and no mistake. Perhaps she was too young for that when you knew her; and had nothing then to stand on her dignity about.”

Here John, able to endure no longer, rose hastily and threw open the window. “The weather gets warm,” he said, “though it is so early, and vegetation is not so far behind in Scotland as we suppose.”

“Behind! I should like to know in what we’re behind!” cried his guest: and then his dark countenance reddened, and he burst into another laugh. “Perhaps you think I’m desperately Scotch,” he said; “but that’s a mistake. I’m as little prejudiced as anybody can be. I was at Oxford myself. I’m not one of your local men. The Earl would like me to take his way and follow his lead, as if I were a country bumpkin, you know. That’s his opinion of every man that has stuck to his own country and not wandered abroad; and now he finds I have my own way of thinking, he doesn’t half like it. We can think for ourselves down in the country just as well as the rest of you.” After he had given vent to these sentiments, however, Torrance got up with a half-abashed laugh. “If you come over to Tinto, Lady Car and I will be glad to see you. We’ll show you some things you can’t see every day⁠—though we are in an out-of-the-way corner, you’re thinking,” he said.

“I have already heard of the treasures of Tinto,” said John, glad that there was something civil to say.

Pat Torrance nodded his head with much self-satisfaction. “Yes, we’ve got a thing or two,” he said. “I’m not a connoisseur myself. I know they’ve cost a fortune⁠—that’s about all I’m qualified to judge of. But Lady Car knows all about them. You would think it was she and not I they belonged to by nature. But come and judge for yourself. I’m not a man to be suspicious of old friends.”

And here he laughed once more, with obvious offensive meaning; but it took John some time to make out what that meaning could be. His visitor had been for some time gone, fortunately for all parties, before it burst upon him. He divined then, that it was he who was supposed to have been poor Carry’s lover, and that her husband’s object was the diabolical one of increasing her misery by the sight of the man whom she had loved and forsaken. Why had she forsaken Beaufort for this rude barnyard hero? Was it for the sake of his great house, which happily was not visible from Dalrulzian, but which dominated half the county with gingerbread battlements, and the flag that floated presumptuous as if the house were a prince’s? Had Carry preferred mere wealth, weighed by such a master, to the congenial spirit of her former lover? It fretted the young man even to think of such a possibility. And the visitors had fretted him each in some special point. They neutralised the breadth of the external landscape with their narrow individuality and busy bustling little schemes. He went out to breathe an air more wholesome, to find refuge from that close pressure of things personal, and circumscribed local scenery, in the genial quietness and freshness of the air outside. How busy they all were in their own way, how intent upon their own plans, how full of suspicion and criticism of each other! Outside all was quiet⁠—the evening wind breathing low, the birds in full chorus. John refreshed himself with a long walk, shaking off his discouragement and partial disgust. Peggy Burnet was at her door, eager to open the gate for him as he passed. She had just tied a blue handkerchief about the pot containing her “man’s” tea, which her eldest child was about to carry. As he sauntered up the avenue, this child, a girl about ten, tied up so far as her shoulders were concerned in a small red-tartan shawl, but with uncovered head and bare legs and feet, overtook him, skimming along the road with her bundle. She admitted, holding down her head shyly, that she was little Peggy, and was carrying her father his tea. “He’s up in the fir-wood on the top of the hill. He’ll no’ be back as long as it’s light.”

“But that is a long walk for you,” said John.

“It’s no’ twa miles, and I’m fond, fond to get into the woods,” said Peggy. She said “wudds,” and there was a curious singsong in the speech to John’s unaccustomed ears. When she went on she did not curtsey to him as a well-conditioned English child would have done, but gave him a merry nod of her flaxen head, which was rough with curls, and sped away noiseless and swift, the red shawl over her shoulders, which was carefully knotted round her waist and made a bunch of her small person, showing far off through the early greenness of the brushwood. When she had gone on a little, she began to sing like a bird, her sweet young voice rising on the air as if it had wings. It was an endless song that Peggy sang, like that of Wordsworth’s reaper⁠—

“Whate’er the theme, the maiden sang

As if her song could have no ending.”

It went winding along, a viewless voice, beyond the house, along the slopes, away into the paleness of the hilltop, where the tall pine-trunks stood up like columns against the light. It was like the fresh scent of those same pines⁠—like the aromatic peat-smoke in the air⁠—a something native to the place, which put the troubles and the passions he had stumbled against out of the mind of the young laird. He was reconciled somehow to Scotland and to nature by little Peggy’s love for the “wudds,” and the clear ringing melody of her endless song.